


Phantom Twin Syndrome

by alyyks



Series: Family Ties [2]
Category: Awaken the Stars Series - Jer Keene
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Family Feels, GFY, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Mention of Mental Health Issues, Psychic Abilities, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-10
Updated: 2018-04-10
Packaged: 2019-04-21 05:49:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,261
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14278236
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alyyks/pseuds/alyyks
Summary: They tell her her brother is dead.—“Ella kind of…didn’t take it well,” Brian says, his eyes still on Neumia’s attempts to gain height with the tire swing.“Ella kind of lost her marbles for a while,” Wesley counters.The Ella side of "Phantom Life Syndrome"





	Phantom Twin Syndrome

**Author's Note:**

> So many many thanks to norcumi for the beta <3 All remaining errors and typos are mine.

+

They tell her her brother is dead.

That’s not entirely how it happens, that’s not the only thing that happens. It’s just the core of it. Everything else is…just an aside. The heat, the sand in every fold of clothing and skin, the sweat nobody has been able to wash off in three days, the ambush, the death attached to every breath, the bullets—even her men and women, who died with their faces in the sand, even the presence of her other brother, the complete _imbecile who left his command to find them_ because _Khodī̂ had a bad feeling_ , are asides. 

Inside, there’s something wrong. She wants to scream, to shove both hands into that gaping, bleeding hole where her twin is supposed to be. There’s something wrong and she can’t do  _anything_ about it. 

“ Ella. Eric’s gone.” 

They tell her her brother is dead.

They’re wrong, they have to be.

+

(here’s what could have happened:

Ella screams at Rex that she doesn’t know where the fuck Eric is, and there’s too much dust, too much sand, too much death to know anything. She keeps her head best as she can, keeps her people alive—and they find Eric, she finds him, and Rex gets their brother’s blood all over him keeping someone who should have died because of a fucking IED alive, missing leg or no missing leg.

The rest of that month is mostly a blur, her sole certainty that Eric is alive, in a hospital somewhere. She’s not allowed to get to him at first. There are a few too many funerals for which she has to get her dress uniform on and she hates every minute of it. Those are her people,  _hers_ , and they deserve better than a byline and a folded flag. They deserved to live and go home. She and the others at least get drunk properly to send them off wherever they’re at.

And then she gets her say and she gets to celebrate her and Eric’s birthday in his hospital room. He’s left a leg, two fingers, a good deal of blood, half his field of vision, and half his hearing behind in Iraq. Ella calls dibs on all the lost hearing and deaf jokes. Neither of  them had intact hearing in the first place . She gets him all the good gossip as respite from all the horrible puns, like Rex somehow smelling like roses even after going straight up AWOL for them, and all the theories as to how that could have happened. Starts with Me and ends with Rill is her best bet, with a nice dose of blackmail. 

There’s some weird shit going on at the hospital, in the few hours she’s not right by her twin’s side. Ella’s not stupid—manipulative, well, duh; probably manic, duh as well; PTSD, duh cubed, comes with the territory; and none of that shit equals unable to see and hear that there are creepy people coming by to talk to her brother when he’s out of his gourd on the good drugs and seriously unable to consent or even know what’s going on. So she calls the cavalry. She still has a few months to go, and then she’s out for good. Siccing Django Whetu on whoever that is seems almost like overkill, but there’s nothing like overkill when it comes to having her twin’s back. 

She can feel Eric, in those last few months where there’s an ocean between them, a semi-regular ping like checking in. She pings back, pushes back mentally every now and then. Distance makes it hard, but he’s there, a small warm presence in the back of her mind, check and balance.

She might have to finish her military career good and proper, but the first night Eric is out of the hospital and at home,  _Dad’s home_ , she climbs into his bed like they’re ten again. They breath e like one body, pressed tight under the quilts. 

Ella could have found Eric, and got him home, and held him through that first night with that bone-deep realization neither of them were dead, wandering in and out of each other’s dreams.

She could have enabled his ideas and fallen half in love with a flamethrower prosthesis and gone around the world like a boomerang, always coming back to her point of origin.

She could have taken off to Canada on a horse and met a weird guy who probably was like them in a cabin in the middle of nowhere.

She could have gone to New Zealand when Rex and Khodī̂ got their tattoos and mocked them relentlessly. She could have filled Khodī̂’s pockets with condoms with a wink when he went on his trip around the South Pacific in their father’s tracks, and gleefully related the exact shade of his blush to Eric.

It’s not what happened.)

+

They tell her her brother is dead and they’re wrong and she’s wrong. She doesn’t stop fighting and trying to plug the hole inside her being where there’s supposed to be another mind, where all that is  _Eric_ is supposed to be. She’s stuck in a loop of expecting him there and being too far from the familiar weight of his being and finding nothing leaning against her thoughts and trying to go further: she’s hopping with her mind in the dark, a perpetual off-balance act. It’s just that this kind of behavior means something else to outside eyes. 

Denial. PTSD. Insanity, when people thinks she’s not in earshot—and then “clinically insane” in her earshot and in her file like no-one gives a fuck anymore and neither does she.

Ella Som gets an honorable discharge and a metaphorical bleeding hole nothing can touch and an empty hole in the ground where her brother will never be and she never wanted to know their father could have this expression on his face, like his world ended and his heart got scooped out. She doesn’t know what her face does. Things don’t seem to work right so she slaps a too-wide, too-tooth y smile on for answer. She makes herself a hurricane. 

They lost a family member, the only person Rex willingly called Mom, six years ago—one more is one too many, too soon, too close.

Late February, early March of the year after Eric’s… Eric’s  _something_ because  _he’s not dead_ is a blur—but then, everything is a blur starting from April 2005. Early 2006 is even worse, and she chalks it up to the meds her latest doc is making her go through, as if drugs could fill Eric’s place. She stops that mess as soon as she can. 

It’s even worse once she’s at home.  _Home_ is Dad’s house, because it makes Django Whetū relax, if infinitesimally, to be able to see his kid there and breathing, to have proof that Ella is not still in the desert, her mind bleeding all over the sand, or in a hospital where she can’t be helped enough, no quite certain of where her mind ends without the balancing act of another presence nestled there. 

Being at home doesn’t make Ella breathe any easier. She takes the same room she grew up in, and the first night Ella tries to sleep without Eric near when he should be, because this is  _their room_ , their  _childhood house_ , she can’t breathe. There’s no sibling whose dreams she can wander safely in; Kai is too young for that, still a baby-face, a darting mind at night familiar and unfamiliar all at once. She dozes outside on the porch that night, makes plans to return to her house, emptier and just as full of ghosts.

Whetū kids aren’t raised to be afraid of those. 

There are blips sometimes, a sensation very much like Eric is right next to her, close enough to touch, impossibly out of reach. She tries to explain it, the certainty that Eric is alive, has to be alive, because she  _can still feel him,_ he’s still  _there_ in her head like she can feel her own arms—in face of that she gets a steady barrage of “you’re crazy,” the same crazy that was carefully kept out of her hearing at first. 

As time passes, as well-meaning assholes docs and shrinks that Khodī̂ insisted and insisted she talk to continue talking at her and she continues to hear them say  _your brother is dead, you can’t feel him, it’s very much like phantom limb syndrome but it’s your twin you lost not your arm,_ from  _sometimes_ the blips of presences go to  _rarely_ , to  _never_ .

They tell her her brother is dead and she is starting to believe them.

+

With Dad’s history and his career and her career come healthy paranoia. Even her sibs who aren’t military have weapons and know how to use them just as well as the ones who have—and had—military careers.

She and Eric had plans. The entire family always had plans. They also had back-up plans for those plans, and a couple more in the back, and get-the-shit-out-of-dodge bags for the whole family buried around the farmhouse just in case, and bags scattered abroad.  _Just in case_ .

Whetū kids aren’t raised to be taken by surprise.

She never really planned for surviving Eric.

With Dad’s history… she clings to that, a desperate hope, calling  _Eric Eric Eric Eric Eric Eric Eric Eric Eric Eric Eric Eric Eric Eric Eric_ in that emptiness she has no words for because they are  _Whetū kids_ . They reach early- to mid-twenties and don’t change physically from there, not any of them who’s past 25, and it’s more than just lucky genetic lottery. Dad’s age is never something they discuss but he saw action in Vietnam and Wolffe was born in ’73 and Django doesn’t look a day over forty and Khodī̂ knew shit was going on in April of 2005 near Baghdad and she can  _share dreams with her siblings_ . Maybe there’s more than those instances of weirdness, maybe there’s a way Eric is still alive, because at some point somewhere, the natural order clearly fucked off and followed different rules for them and thus her brother _can not be dead_ . 

The farmhouse is their,  _EricandElla’s_ ,  _EllaandEric’s_ . The changes they did, more than renovations when the original building was crumbling stone foundations and decrepit piles of wood, including the caches built within the walls and the extra wiring that could double as explosive, both of them planned them, worked on them, bugout and hideout and shelter. This house could stand empty for years at the time and not need any checking. This house could disappear with the judicious use of one single detonator.  _Just in case_ -s are a way of life. 

She can’t sleep in her bed. It’s too open, too soft, too warm. She can feel the weight of emptiness in those walls that were safety once. She can hear the silence in Eric’s room, in the workshop. There’s no-one to turn on the servers, the Frankenstein’s Monster-style computers, to curse in the middle of the night or bump into a crate or complain about her armory taking all the space. There’s no-one to turn on the coffee machine before she gets up.

She turns on all the machines, all the lights, runs through the rooms and screams. There’s no-one to answer.

She reaches out and out, calling for Eric with her mind hopping in the dark, further and further away until there’s nothing to reach for.

They tell her her brother is dead and they buried an empty casket and Ella is starting to feel like there’s something slipping loose—or even already gone—that she had never needed to check in when it was  _EricandElla_ and there’s no ghost in her house.

+

Horses.

Apparently it’s a phase many American kids, most of them girls, go through in their teens.

Ella went thorough a “Bash dickheads’ heads in” in her teens. Crazy how racist assholes underestimated speed and size. Rex always smiles when he recalls witnessing her doing that shit at their high school. Good times. Honestly she didn’t really grow out of that phase, she just got better at it, and at not getting caught. Bar fights are great stress relievers, fight her.

But. Horses. Ella knows how to ride and care for one, but they’re not… . They’re smart, working animals, not cute pets one keeps around for the pleasure of another living thing living near you. 

The idea is from her latest therapist. Start with going to a stable that does therapy animals whatever, go pet an animal that is big enough to squish you good and proper by sitting if the idea goes through their head, go from there, maybe a possibility of raising animals as on-going therapy, never-ever have to touch the fucking drugs that make her not herself again.

Horses are big, smelly, grounded, and remind her of the one and only time Khodī̂ rode one when he, Eric and she went back to Cambodia to visit their mother. Khodī̂ got bit. The memory makes her laugh, and then it makes her cry, her arms around one big, smelly, grounded mare that just stands there and breath e wetly into her hair and doesn’t ask anything of her. 

Maybe she won’t punch Khodī̂ for giving her that therapist’s number. Not a bad punch, at least. And there’s something, under Khodī̂’s quiet and his insistence that makes her want to call him “Lieutenant Colonel Som, sir!” just so he would check himself and stop acting like her CO instead of her  _brother_ , but it’s one of the things that’s slipping loose, inside and outside. She can’t stop, for anything. Have to move, have to keep going, as if if she runs and yells and fights loud and strong enough  _her brother is dead_ will never catch up to her. 

+

There’s a man up in Canada. She met him in Chicago the first time. She had just taken off with half a bugout bag in a backpack, following the emptiness-that-wasn’t-one in her mind and heart, feeling like she was going to burst open or fall apart if she stayed in one place one minute more. She only had left a note at Dad’s, curt enough that there wouldn’t be a well-meaning brother going after her ass. Not the first time she takes off, one of the few times she leaves a message.

There are days she’s not entirely sure this man, her friend, exists. He’s not family. He doesn’t know their history, the grounds for their justifiable paranoia, the exact taste of sand and blood and sweat in a mouth desperate for water.

He’s pretty much a horse, big and grounded, just that he lives in a cabin in the middle of fucking nowhere like some kind of wild animal in human form. When she tells him that, the horse bit, he thanks her kindly and takes it as a compliment. 

There are days she thinks he’s one more piece of evidence that the natural order can and does fuck off now and then, that what she knows she and her family can do and hear and see is not just them, never been just them. There are others out there and some of them are even just as crazy as she’s told she is.

Whetū kids are a seriously fucked up bar to set for sanity.

She doesn’t tell her friend any of that of fucking course. He’s not family. And then they go hunt a deer and it turns into a skidoo chase with maple syrup thieves and she laughs so hard at the absurdity of it all she cries and yells and breathes all the way.

She’s not okay. She’s still running. There are days she’s not entirely sure she hasn’t turned into a ghost in her own life, there but not there, suspended between two states. There are days she wants to look, research, know what she is, what legacy they carry—on those days the paranoia rears up its head like the sun on the horizon at dawn, like the most obvious warning sign in the world. She has a bad feeling about this—or she would have if she could stop running from the emptiness still bleeding inside, even two years after, even three, four, five, six….

+

_Eric Eric Eric Eric Eric Eric Eric Eric Eric Eric Eric Eric Eric Eric Eric_ she sends out at night, again and again and again because once a habit is formed it’s there to stay.  _Eric Eric Eric_ she calls in the empty house, she calls to the cat that picked her from somewhere and lives in the house like it always lived there—  _Eric Eric Eric_ to the barn now full of trail horses, to the trail she takes off on to avoid one Thanksgiving after another —  _Eric Eric Eric,_ _I_ _wish you could see them_ to their baby brother’s high school graduation, to their niece’s birth, to their mother’s now fully-silver hair. 

He always, always answered—as kids, as teens, as Rangers.

He never does anymore, not since April 2005, not since they told her he was dead, not since the rare blips of presence vanished.

_Her brother is dead_ . 

It’s not reaching the state of grief that called acceptance. It’s accepting that she has a bleeding hole inside herself, that she once was two and now is only one, that for all they are all freaks of nature she can’t explain any of that to her father or her brothers, that her brothers think she went crazy after Eric disappeared—and really, she can hardly say they’re completely wrong.

It’s not the life she had planned for with her twin at her side but it’s  _her life_ . Bleeding and hurting and she turns herself into a hurricane of a woman to keep all her parts together, to keep running, to force that ghostly life of hers into a shape she can deal with. 

Her brother is dead.

+

She greets her brothers, father and niece plus extra with her shotgun into Rex’s back and a narrow glare. It’s not a special day she “forgot,” it’s not normal, it’s her whole entire family climbing out of Wesley’s Creepy Van. It’s a situation to assess and defend from.

It’s a blown up childhood farmhouse, and Rex’s boyfriend, and sloppy parental seconds. It’s  _Rangers_ sent after her and her family, Rangers.  _Her_ people.  _Eric_ ’s people.

It’s using the detonator and wiring that was there  _just in case_ , just for paranoia’s sake, to blow up her house.  _Her_ house, not  _EricandElla_ , because there hasn’t been  _EricandElla_ for over ten years, and no-one else will ever have it. Good way to distract from their tracks as well, even if her horses are very, very good and so is she and there are many different ways to vanish in the woods here. 

It’s split and run to Vietnam using plans set up  _just in case_ , using bags buried years ago  _just in case_ .

It’s seeing her older brother being  _shot in the head_ and _shaking it off like nothing happened_ .

They are freaks of nature, and more than nature—straight up human experiments, the kind of history people find very convenient to swipe under the rug and call conspiracy theory.

Ella might be far from baseline normal, but all Whetū kids are, in many different ways. Most important of all, she was right.

Her brother is not dead. 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, yes that was a micro Due South crossover. Tell me it doesn't make perfect sense.


End file.
